NOT only is the European Union going in a direction that the vast majority of British people find unacceptable but it is doing so at an accelerating rate.

Anyone would think that preparing to create a “fiscal union” in which the vast majority of member nations surrender control over tax and spending policies to Eurocrats would prove sufficient to sate their appetite for extra power. But it is not.

Now it has emerged that the so-called “Berlin Group” of senior Europhile politicians are locked in talks about how to create a dominant single President of Europe who would hold sway over national leaders.

For many years pro-EU politicians in Britain lied about the plan to create a United States of Europe, claiming it was a figment of the imaginations of opponents whom they smeared as xenophobes. There is no denying it now.

The EU has become a monstrous bureaucratic entity that undermines prosperity and sucks the lifeblood from participating democracies. If those living on the European mainland are willing to tolerate it then they are foolish but it is up to them.

What is no longer tolerable is the spectacle of Britain being dragged towards a dismal fate as an outpost of a European empire nobody ever voted for.

More and more people can see that we need to escape from this failing and increasingly absurd organisation. Any politician who goes into the next general election opposing a referendum should expect to lose his job come polling day.